What is it?

Critical thinking

Critical thinking• In recent years, “critical thinking” has in educational circles become something of a “buzz-phrase.”

• There are many reasons for it, but there has been a growing interest in educators to teach “critical thinking skills” of various kinds in contrast with merely conveying information and substantive content.

• It is of course crucial that both are taught, yet in the past the emphasis has always seem to on teaching mere substantive content like history, physics, or philosophy. But while teachers will always claim that by presenting and teaching content, they are teaching their students “how to think,” but if honest most would admit that they do so only implicitly in the course of teaching the content. (Some educators have argued strongly against the teaching of thinking or critical thinking as separate subjects, claiming that they cannot and do not exist outside the subject domain, that all inquiry is domain-specific thinking, that the structures and methods of a specific subject are what precisely underpin good thinking, and that thinking is less effective when reasoning outside the subject domain since its concept structures are not present).

• One of the reasons why critical thinking has become more of a central focus in educational circles is because of the growing skepticism over the effectiveness of teaching critical skills the indirect way.

• Most students simply do not pick them up because they never have been explicitly or directly articulated, not merely in the context of the classroom but as being transferrable to other subjects and even real world contexts.

Critical thinking• The goal therefore has been to explicitly and directly teach critical thinking skills not just in the

classroom setting but with the aim of having these skills transferable to all areas of life.

• However, as fashionable as “Critical Thinking” may be becoming, it is necessary before it gets pulled in many perhaps conflicting directions, to get a grasp of critical thinking as it has emerged and developed in the course of the Western tradition of philosophical thought.

• The Greeks of classical antiquity were the first people in the history of the evolution of the human mind to have become thematically conscious of and to have canonized critical thinking within the Western tradition of intellectual thought.

• Critical thinking was born and canonized in Plato’s distinction between Knowledge and belief.

Critical thinking• Its locus classicus is in Plato’s dialogue the Meno, where Socrates talks of “true opinions

which can be aroused by questioning and turned into knowledge.”

• But what is the difference between Knowledge and belief?

• For the person who has a correct belief about the way to get to Athens is just as good a guide as one who has knowledge.

• The difference, on Socrates’ view, does not and cannot rest in degree of usefulness.

• Knowledge has one added component: “True opinions are fine and useful as long as they stay with us; but they do not stay, and they depart from the mind. So they are not of great value until you fasten them down by working out the reason why. Once they are fastened, they become knowledge and then they are more permanent. Hence knowledge a is finer and better thing than true opinion, since it is secured by a chain.”

Critical Thinking The point is that one who has knowledge is able to back up his opinion by providing a

justification or an explanatory account.

Only when opinion is secured by a rational account, only when one can explain why a given belief is correct, is that belief entitled to the accolade of knowledge. Only then can one be said to have engaged in critical thinking.

As the English mathematician and philosopher W.K. Clifford wrote: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

The great American thinker John Dewey (1859-1952) can be said to be the father of modern critical thinking tradition. He referred to it as “reflective thinking” and defined it as the “active, persistent, and careful consideration of a belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds which support it and the further conclusions to which it tends.”

Critical thinking• Close examination of Dewey’s definition unpacks thinking as not a passive but rather an

“active” process, contrasted with the kind of thinking that occurs, for example, in the high schools, where the student is considered a empty vessels passively awaiting knowledge to be poured into them.

• For Dewey children are active centers of impulse, shaped by but also shaping their environment.

• Hence, the fundamental aim of education is not simply to convey information but to develop critical methods of thought.

• Education is future-oriented and as the future is uncertain; therefore, it is paramount to develop habits of social interaction that are not mechanical following custom or impulsive out of fear, but flexible habits of autonomous critical thought and intelligent choice that would enable the student to deliberate, make value judgments, choose, and intelligently work out a satisfactory adjustment with one’s surroundings.

Critical thinking• While Dewey did not dismiss a place for the “Great Books” in the college curriculum, i.e., while

he did not ever suggest we turn our backs on the past, for what we know now we own to the past, but we cannot value the past for its own sake.

• The past is to be valued for its role in developing and guiding those critical capacities that will enable us to deal with present situations and problems.

• Another important point of Dewey’s definition is in what he says about the “grounds which support” a belief and the “further conclusions to which it tends.”

• He is saying that what really matters are the reasons one has for believing in something, as well as the implications of those beliefs.

• Hence, for Dewey, in the final analysis, schools must be more concerned with providing students with “instruments of effective self-direction,” meaning that children must be taught how to think, i.e., are taught how to ask the question: “What are the reasons for believe this?”

Critical thinking• Edward Glaser offers the following definition of critical thinking:

• “(1) an attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful way the problems and subjects that come within the range of one’s experience; (2) knowledge of the methods of logical enquiry and reasoning; and (3) some skill in applying those methods. Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends.”

• Hence, following Dewey, Glaser recognizes that critical thinking isn’t just partly a matter of having certain thinking skills ready-to-hand as the Praetor’s edict can be read on his notice-board, but really a matter of being attitudinally disposed to use them, i.e., from the development of habits of mind that enable us adequately to assess new situations and to formulate strategies for dealing with their problematic dimensions.

Critical thinking• Two well known and contemporaneous contributors to the development of the critical thinking

tradition are Robert Ennis and Richard Paul.

• Ennis defines critical thinking as “reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do.”

• Richard Paul’s definition reads: “Critical thinking is that mode of thinking—about any subject, content or problem—in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully taking charge of the structures inherent in thinking and imposing intellectual standards upon them.”

Critical thinking

• Hence, the critical thinking tradition seeks to teach critico-creative thinking skills, i.e., the ability to interpret, analyze, and evaluate ideas and arguments, by teaching them explicitly and directly. The idea, following Dewey, is that if a student can learn how to judge the credibility of an argument or source of evidence, he or she will be able to apply these methods of inquiry to other contexts, to real-life situations.

• This is the basis for the entire project of college teaching and learning, which is the project of the modern mind, exemplified in the scientific method, viz., to base belief only on rational and warrantable bases. It is the method of science understood as the method of thinking that Dewey views as of the highest social and educational significance.

• For college work in contradistinction to high school work, requires an intellectual activity that is in addition to the activity of understanding material.

• Rather than treating material as an unchanging fact, like the high school attitude, the college attitude deals with the rational justification of belief, expressive of a paradigm-shift from authority to rational evaluation.

Critical thinking

• Critical thinking is a complex concept that has been defined in a number of ways, including as metacognition (Paul, 2005), as logical argument analysis (Watson & Glaser, 2006), and as careful weighing of the evidence to support a claim (Bensley, 1998).

• While most educators agree that it is vital to teach critical thinking (Flores, Matkin, Burbach, Quinn & Harding, 2012; Wyer, 2009), they do not always agree on the definition or specific skills we are hoping to instill in students (Chenault & Duclos-Orsello, 2008).

question• There is an argument in some academic circles, that the humanities, in contrast with the

sciences, is without value, totally subjective, ultimately irrational, and containing nothing significant for us because it can never convey THE TRUTH.

• 1. Anyone’s theory, position, or interpretation in the humanities is as good or as bad as anyone else’s.

• 2. Provided one adopts some interpretation, it doesn’t matter which, because there is no way of proving that one interpretation is better than another.

• 3. Thus, there is no point in teaching the humanities because Truth there is what one chooses it to be.

Critical thinking• Critical Thinking: Seven Steps

• 1) What am I being asked to believe or accept?

• 2) What evidence is available to support the claim?

• 3) What alternative ways are there to interpret the evidence?

• 4) Rate the evidence/alternatives on 0-10 scale based on validity/strength

• 5) What assumptions or biases came up when doing the above steps?

• (e.g., using intuition/emotion, authority, or personal experience rather than

• science)

• 6) What additional evidence would help us evaluate the alternatives?

• 7) What conclusions are most reasonable or likely?

Critical thinking• Books on critical thinking will vary in the specific types of “thinking maps” to be applied by

students to their own thinking processes, but Dr. Jackson’s “Good Thinker’s Took Kit” is a good place to start in developing critical thinking skills with an emphasis on learning outcomes, evidence-based inquiry learning, cooperative group work, and the development of the individual by encouraging questioning and the exploration of questions that arise in classroom interaction.